Anyone got any fresh rumours [or rumors, depending on what country you're from ] of a consumer oriented digital panoramic camera? And by consumer, I'm just referring to the cost The Seitz is *slightly* out of my price range.

A quick search online shows some people have been talking/wishing for years. I know there's cameras that have modes for it, and there's always the option to stitch in post.... but I'd love to be able to frame it in or on the camera.

Anyone got any fresh rumours [or rumors, depending on what country you're from ] of a consumer oriented digital panoramic camera? And by consumer, I'm just referring to the cost The Seitz is *slightly* out of my price range.

A quick search online shows some people have been talking/wishing for years. I know there's cameras that have modes for it, and there's always the option to stitch in post.... but I'd love to be able to frame it in or on the camera.

That's one option I've played with in the past. I recall an annual family holiday where I'd photographed the place so much over the years that I set myself a challenge to shoot with the intent on cropping into pano's later in post. Made for a fresh perspective and I got some reasonable results considering I'm a hack photographer

Maybe I could just take a screwdriver to my old DSLR and kill off the top and bottom pixels, then tape up the viewfinder to match LOL!

If I own an innovative camera company, I will make a sensor with the dimensions of 18mmx48, about the ratio of Xpan and has about the same area as a 35mm full frame sensor so it can be produced relatively inexpensively. The diagonal is 51mm which is just a bit larger than the 43mm for the 35mm cameras, so any new lens design can be made to be competitive with 35mm counterparts in terms of size and cost.

So the camera, assuming it's a rangefinder, could be between the size of a Leica M and the Xpan. If liveview works well, then you don't need a rangefinder. Otherwise, license the RF design from Cosina Bessa or Fuji XPan and you are there.

I am happy with a m4/3 camera and a Fotodiox shift adapter. The adapter/lens attaches to the tripod and the camera moves so there is no parallax error. 35mm legacy lenses greater than about 50mm require no special handling. Shorter focal lengths require the LR flat field plugin to correct for color shift and corner fall off. I have gotten good results using as short as a 28mm although I had to try a couple in order to get one that worked well-there are sometimes problems getting infinity focus.

Shifting for the exposures is fast and the registration upon stitching in near perfect. With the flat field plugin the exposure is very even across the frame. You end up with close to a 3:1 aspect ratio which is fine by me. I stash a small bag about the size of a shaving kit with the adapter, 28, 50, 80, and 200 focal lengths in the car so I always have the option of panos.

A 645 medium format camera + 35mm lens + 22MP digital back, all used, cost about $7000. You can crop the 48mmx36mm image to 48mmx24mm for 2:1 panaroma. It will be close to the digital Hasselblad Xpan (45mm lens, 65mm x 24mm), not as wide yet, but I prefer 2:1 raio to 2.7:1.

Any single-sensor camera that can even come close to the quality available from stitching DSLR images isn't going to be cheap any time soon.

My favorite complaint about stitching is the lack of a reasonable viewfinding system. Do any of the current DSLR's offer in-camera, right-after-shooting stitching composites? Like some cheap point&shoot and smartphone cameras do? Or is that asking too much of a $3000+ camera body? Would be almost as good as a real viewfinder. Or at least a little better than no viewfinder at all.

Of course my two, 300mm wood dowels connected top and bottom by strings is a step in right direction. Just roll up the string on one of the dowels to adjust the aspect ratio. A skillfull string roller can, while rolling, converge the string towards each other to create a telephone viewfinder. Hah! Now nobody can patent it!

The Sietz does take multiple lenses, as you see here http://www.roundshot.ch/xml_1/internet/en/application/d77/d122/f124.cfm it has a similar style mounting system to Alpa cameras, and has its own lens boards which will fit Schneider / Rodenstock lenses etc, and apparently there are adapter plates available to use already mounted Fuji 617 and Linhof Technorama 617 lenses (mounted in their proprietary mounts) on the camera. I hope to have one for review, or to rent one some time in the spring (entirely for fun) and do a review as well. I expect it to be a particularly challenging camera to use because it is a scanning back etc, but it can truly produce some amazing images as you can see here in the LuLa main site review http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/seitz-d3.shtml

I'm surprised that some enterprising camera/back maker hasn't enabled a 6x17 panoramic mode for a full size sensor and the corresponding cropped viewfinder to go with it for the body. From a marketing perspective it could be sold as a panoramic camera even though you're literally just discarding pixels from the actual sensor capture.

Of course, this isn't anything new since that's precisely what every consumer camera with real panoramic mode does anyway such as the Panasonic LX / Leica DLux cameras.

When you consider the investment it's no wonder why manufacturers just say that you can do it anyway using cropping or shift & join in post. Lets face it, with medium format digital you're really not short of pixels to play with.

The Horizon DL3 was announced at the 2010 Photokina, with 3x5 MP sensors, but not sure if it was finally produced.Some sites like Silvestri's (who co-produced the prototype) announced a 3x9 MP sensors on the Photokina 2012. Unfortunately, as I was never really interested in a panoramic camera, I didn't take a look in Cologne.Looks interesting nevertheless, if it is available, a 3x12 MP triple sensor would be nice, they can't be more expensive than 9MP nowadays. We are talkinf small sensors here I suppose.

I'm surprised that some enterprising camera/back maker hasn't enabled a 6x17 panoramic mode for a full size sensor and the corresponding cropped viewfinder to go with it for the body. From a marketing perspective it could be sold as a panoramic camera even though you're literally just discarding pixels from the actual sensor capture.

Exactly. Simply switching off the top and bottom pixels to a specific panoramic ratio would be ideal if they don't want to produce pano sensors. I recall the days of APS film cameras where you had 3 modes which changed the viewfinder - one being panoramic images.